


I Found Myself Wishing I Had Known You In A Different Time

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: 1940s AU, Cecil has been in love with Carlos for far longer than Carlos knows, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 04:31:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil has been in love with Carlos for a long, long time. Even if Carlos hasn't always been in the same form that he is in now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Found Myself Wishing I Had Known You In A Different Time

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a post I made on my tumblr a couple of weeks ago: http://thethespacecoyote.tumblr.com/post/58230227090/carlos-is-a-reincarnation-of-a-man-that-cecil-met
> 
> This is set in the 1940s, immediately after the end of World War II. 
> 
> I mention the "demon core" and atomic viewing parties in this fic, both of which were real things! Look them up if you want more information, atomic era stuff is really fascinating, with or without a Night Vale context. :)
> 
> Enjoy!

When I first meet you, it is at the crisp peach of the morning. I'm in my best hareskin shoes and mauve shirt with the solitary tie that hadn't unfortunately manifested into my coffee maker overnight. You've just arrived with a team, set to work on the testing facilities that crest the craggy hills overlooking the mist-strewn basin of Thorium Canyon. I'm a nervous neophyte from the local Journal, eager to cover stories aside from the purely inhuman interest. You look radiant framed by the sunrise that smells faintly of salmon. 

When I first share a cup of coffee with you over the speckled baby-blue linoleum of the recently opened Moonlite All-Nite Diner you're curious about all the quirks and  of our happy little burg, and I'm willing to inform you to the full extent that I _can_. I tell you that they have a wonderful special here on Thursdays, a delectable slice of pie made with only the finest Non-Euclidean peaches and topped with cream that induces fits of nostalgia. You ask if I'm joking and I laugh, because your joke is far funnier. 

We talk about the war; when I mention with pride how I fulfilled my duty through daily chanting and frenetic moans you sputter, eyebrows raised as if I'd said something outlandish. You try to say something about war bonds and rationing, but I chuckle and pat your hand. You certainly have some interesting ideas about how the world works. 

When I first kiss you there are taboos that I don't quite understand, strange constraints in place from a world where everyday occurrences aren't strange and volatile enough to make each and every show of affection, regardless of gender, celebrated and _necessary_. 

When I first make love to you you are scared, you are sweating so much that it's getting in your eyes and you have to close them, close them up tight. You don't look at me until long after it's over, but when you do you press and shaky kiss to my knuckles and I feel as if my skin is translucent, even though it's not September. 

I invite you to a party at millionaire and therefore most valued citizen Remus Vanstern's house; one of those elegant affairs where he ushers people out onto the balcony of the mansion overlooking the Sand Wastes so that they can watch the atomic testings go off in the shimmering sunset of the horizon. You balk at that, mumble something about "nuclear fall out" with a frantic little waves of your fingers. I assure you that the balcony is quite secure, and that nobody will be falling out of anywhere. You sigh and rub your temples, and I manage to lightly kiss at one before you pull away, eyes furtive. 

You say you're busy, and that you have to do a demonstration for some new additions to the team.You tell me to meet you at the diner the following day, though. I tell you it's a date. 

At the party, I watch the orange clouds from the tests bloom in the fat curve of my wine glass, and I wonder what it's like to see those clouds reflected in your glasses as you scratch notes and symbols down. On the balcony, Remus puts a hairy hand on my arm and asks about you. I drive home at night and dream of the reactions you talk about, and wonder if it's like the heat agitated between our thighs. 

I don't hear back from you when the morning comes. One day passes, and I wonder. Two days pass, and I weep. Three days pass, and I worry. 

Four days pass, and I call the number of the facility, asking for your name. 

They don't tell me, so I drive out to the facility myself and demand to see you. Amidst the stern wall of protocol and secrecy there's a soft spot of an older man, with no hair and tan skin and a lab coat soft and worn and unlike yours who takes me aside with pity and discloses what has happened. 

That you had been leading the demonstration for the newly minted researchers, that the core you had been working with was notoriously unstable, that your hand had slipped, that there had been a flash of bright blue and you'd been so close, too close, close enough to lose; that it'd caused you to wither and shiver and bleed. That you are doing this withering and shivering and bleeding somewhere within the facility just beyond my reach, slowly decaying from the inside out in walls zipped off with plastic and attendants clad in alien suits and hoods. 

I'm not allowed to see you. I'm allowed to be there, not there to hold your hand or watch you die. They whisk your body off before I even knew what had happened, presumably back to your family, and I realize that you never had the chance to tell me much about them. I wish you had. I fear that now I will never know. 

I don't know what your death was like, and I wonder if the images in my head are as terrible or as hopeful as the reality. 

Years later, things are so very different. The testing facility has been long abandoned, and overgrown with a teal peat bog. Marcus has yet to display the latent lycanthropy that felled his father. The Moonlite All-Nite Diner no longer serves cream with its pie, due to the infestation of cream worms that devastated all whipped crops a couple of years back. Non-Euclidean peaches are banned due to changes in the City Council's stance on geometric theoreticals. 

Everything feels like a quiet denouement, a slow exponential curve downwards, from the climax that was knowing you. That is, until I see you again. Until I see you; dressed in different clothes and face and hair and name and yet unmistakably you, unmistakably perfect and with a rush of nostalgia that no cream can possibly imitate. And then those years of difference seem only an interlude, a momentary stop on the slope of both of our lives. 

I said that I had fallen in love instantly, but that wasn't true. 

What's true is that I have been in love with you for a long time. 


End file.
